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Software developers need to build solutions quickly so that businesses remain competitive and agile. This blog post shows you how Taskmatics Scheduler and Enzo Unified can help developers build and deploy solutions very quickly by removing two significant pain points: the learning curve of new APIs, and orchestrating Internet services.

Sample Solution

Let’s build a solution that checks incoming flights in Miami, Florida and send a text message using SMS when new flights arrive to one or more phone numbers. To track flight arrivals, we will be using the FlightAware service which provides a REST API to retrieve flight information. To send SMS messages, we will be using Twilio’s service which provides an API as well for sending messages.

To remove the learning from these APIs, we used Enzo Unified, a Backend as a Service (BaaS) platform that enables the consumption of services through native SQL statements. Enzo Unified abstracts communication and simplifies development of a large number of internal systems and Internet services. In this example, Enzo Unified is hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform for scalability and operational efficiency.

To orchestrate and schedule the solution, we used the Taskmatics Scheduler platform. Taskmatics calls into your custom code written in .NET on a schedule that you specify, which is configured to connect to Enzo Unified in the cloud. The call to Enzo Unified is made using ADO.NET by sending native SQL statements to pull information from FlightAware, and send an SMS message through Twilio. At a high level, the solution looks like this:

High Level call sequence between Taskmatics Scheduler and Enzo Unified

How To Call FlightAware and Twilio with Enzo Unified

Developers can call Enzo Unified using a REST interface, or a native SQL interface. In this example, the developer uses the SQL interface, leveraging ADO.NET. The following code connects to Enzo Unified as a database endpoint using the SqlConnection class, and sends a command to fetch flights from a specific airport code using an SqlCommand object. Fetching FlightAware data is as simple as calling the “Arrived” stored procedure against the “flightaware” database schema.

If you inspect the above code carefully, you will notice that it does not reference the APIs of FlightAware or Twilio. Indeed, calling both FlightAware and Twilio was done using ADO.NET calls against Enzo Unified; because Enzo Unified behaves like a native database server (without the need to install special ODBC drivers), authenticating, making the actual API calls, and interpreting the REST results was entirely abstracted away from the developer, and replaced by an SQL interface, which dramatically increases developer productivity. Database developers can call Enzo Unified directly to test FlightAware and Twilio using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). The following picture shows the results of calling Enzo Unified from SSMS to retrieve arrived flights from FlightAware.

Calling the FlightAware service using simple SQL syntax in SQL Server Management Studio

Sending a SMS text message using Twilio is just as simple using SSMS:

Calling the Twilio service using simple SQL syntax in SQL Server Management Studio

How To Schedule The Call With Taskmatics Scheduler

In order to run and schedule this code, we are using Taskmatics Scheduler, which provides an enterprise grade scheduling and monitoring platform. When a class written in .NET inherits from the Taskmatics.Scheduler.Core.TaskBase class, it becomes automatically available as a custom task inside the Taskmatics Scheduler user interface. This means that a .NET library can easily be scheduled without writing additional code. Furthermore, marking the custom class with the InputParameters attribute provides a simple way to specify input parameters (such as the airport code to monitor, and the phone numbers to call) for your task through the Taskmatics user interface.
The following simplified code shows how a custom task class is created so that it can be hosted inside the Taskmatics Scheduler platform. Calling Context.Logger.Log gives developers the ability to log information directly to Taskmatics Scheduler for troubleshooting purposes.

namespace Taskmatics.EnzoUnified.FlightTracker
{
// Mark this class so it is visible in the Taskmatics interface
[InputParameters(typeof(FlightNotificationParameters))]
public class FlightNotificationTask : TaskBase
{
// Override the Execute method called by Taskmatics on a schedule
protected override void Execute()
{
// Retrieve parameters as specified inside Taskmatics
var parameters = (FlightNotificationParameters)Context.Parameters;
// Invoke method that calls FlightAware through Enzo Unified
var arrivedFlights = GetArrivedFlights(parameters);
// do more work here… such as identify new arrivals
var newFlights = FlightCache.FilterNewArrivals(arrivedFlights);
// Do we have new arrivals since last call?
if (newFlights.Count > 0)
{
// Invoke method that calls Twilio through Enzo Unified
var results = SendArrivedFlightsViaSMS(newFlights, parameters);
// Update cache so these flights won’t be sent through SMS again
FlightCache.SaveFlightsToCache(newFlights);
}
else
Context.Logger.Log("SMS phase skipped due to no new arrivals.");
Context.Logger.Log("Job execution complete.");
}
}
}

Installing the task into the Taskmatics Scheduler platform is very straightforward. Log into the user interface and create a definition for the flight tracker task. This step allows you to import your library into the system to serve as a template for the new scheduled task that we will create next.

Import your custom task as a definition

Schedule your custom task to run on the days and times you specify.

Once you have created your definition, go to the “Scheduled Tasks” section of the user interface, and create the task by selecting the definition that you just created from the Task dropdown. This is also where you will schedule the time and frequency that the task will run as well as configure the input parameters for the task.

Configure the parameters for the scheduled task.

Finally, from the Dashboard screen, you can run your task manually and watch the output live, or look at a past execution of the task to see the outcome and logs from that run. In the image below, you can see the execution of the Flight Tracking task where we monitored recent arrivals into the Miami International Airport (KMIA).

Review and analyze previous task executions or watch your tasks live as they run.

Conclusion

This blog post shows how developers can easily build integrated solutions without having to learn complex APIs using simple SQL statements, thanks to Enzo Unified’s BaaS platform. In addition, developers can easily orchestrate and schedule their libraries using the Taskmatics Scheduler platform. Combining the strengths of Enzo Unified and Taskmatics, organizations can reap the following benefits:

Rapid application development by removing the learning curve associated with APIs

About Blue Syntax Consulting

Our mission is to make your business successful through the technologies we build, create innovative solutions that are relevant to the technical community, and help your company adopt cloud computing where it makes sense. We are now making APIs irrelevant with Enzo® Unified. For more information about Enzo Unified and how developers can access services easily using SQL statements or a simple REST interface, visit http://www.enzounified.com or contact Blue Syntax Consulting at info@bluesyntaxconsulting.com.

About Taskmatics

Taskmatics was founded by a group of developers looking to improve the productivity of their peers. Their flagship application, Taskmatics Scheduler, aims to boost developer productivity and reduce the effort involved in creating consistent and scalable tasks while providing a centralized user interface to manage all aspects of your task automation. For more information and a free 90-day trial, visit us or email us at info@taskmatics.com.